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As anyone who has watched a zombie movie knows, your chances of surviving the apocalypse are only as good as the people you choose to do the surviving with. And you do need other people: as romantic as might sound to wait out the Armageddon alone in a cabin full of beans, blankets, and bullets, survival is a group activity. I have no idea how handy Annalee Newitz is with an axe or a shotgun, but she comes armed with something potentially more useful during a planet-wide disaster: pragmatic optimism. From the evidence of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, she’s the type who could look out at a streetscape teeming with reanimated corpses and declare that, hey, at least we don’t have to waste precious time burying the dead.

Newitz is a San Francisco-based author, journalist and editor who is perpetually immersed in the wide-eyed world of counter-culture geekdom. She edits the hugely popular science and science fiction web site io9.com, which is the kind of site that gets equally excited about interactive maps of regional American accents, digital portraits made from DNA found in chewing gum, and Star Trek spoilers. She is also a lifelong apocalypse junkie, conditioned by a lifetime of sci-fi consumption to gobble up stories about mass collapses.

When Newitz began working on this book, she fully intended to come to the conclusion that we as a species are royally screwed. Mass extinction was a feature of earthly life, not a bug: the planet goes through one roughly every 62 million years, and we’re already overdue. “But soon I discovered something I didn’t expect,” she writes, “a single bright narrative thread that ran through every story of death. That thread was survival. No matter how horrific things got, in geologic and human history, life endured.”

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is somewhat schizophrenic in its approach to suggesting how we might continue to endure. It’s a far more seriously meant and thoroughly researched book than, say, The Zombie Survival Guide. Newitz doesn’t offer tips on converting household objects into weapons that can be used against looters — her perspective is much wider, in terms of the scope of humanity she is addressing, and the breadth of history she is observing. Her prescription for human survival is contained within the book’s title. We must scatter, like the Jews have done throughout their history, fleeing oppression and worse to build flourishing communities elsewhere. We must adapt, the way a blue-green form of algae called cyano has, allowing it to thrive throughout just about all of planetary history. And we must remember, the way grey whales manage and alter their epic annual migrations by teaching their young how to do it, and quickly absorbing all changes in the route. We must also change the way we plan and build cities, and prepare ourselves now for our inevitable colonization of near-space.

The other side of Newitz’s book is its programmatic geekiness, which goes beyond the frequent lapses into the tone of a kind of middle-school science report. (“Why is photosynthesis so awesome?” asks one section heading.) Newitz is equally enthusiastic about every potential life-on-earth-saver she encounters. This makes for a lot of fascinating reading, but it lessens the gravity of the book’s explicit assertion, which is that disaster is coming, one way or another, and most people are going to die as a result. It’s also far too glib and utopian in its dismissal of the political, cultural, and financial divisions that might make some of these survival strategies less than effective. Still: things like unkillable algae and space elevators to the moon are pretty cool. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember may not work as an urgent call-to-action, but as a very readable anthology of all the ways our species might avoid extinction, it’s far from a disaster.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of A Week of This: a novel in seven days, and the culture editor at Toronto Life magazine.

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